It is one of the aims of this portal to bring out the forming power of language contact and especially its ethnolinguistic conditioning in the development of the Alpine language area. The conception of the database will allow depicting the recorded loan words also quantitatively in their local accumulation. For they result automatically when the affiliation of the informant to one of the three language families does not match the affiliation of the etymon. There are three language families that form the modern Alpine region in the form of dialect continua, which are of different size and especially of different degrees of distinction. The distribution areas of the three language families cannot be depicted on specific states cf. actual language areas. Germanic is represented by Alemannic and Bavarian varieties which are part of the pluricentric German language. The common reference to the Swiss, German and Austrian standard variety is, however, not longer given for some of the Walser and Old Bavarian (Cimbrian) language islands in the Southern Alps. Unlike the German-speaking area the varieties of the Romance continuum can be classified as belonging to several languages. Besides French and Italian, it is about – in accordance with the political recognition in Switzerland and Italy – Occitan, Franco-Provençal, Romansh, Ladin and Friulian. The Slavonic language family is represented by Slovenian dialects that are spoken in Slovenia, but also in several Italian and Austrian municipalities. It is not the aim of VerbaAlpina to describe the dialects in the Alpine area as completely as possible, to bring out the local or regional dialect borders and to represent the region as a jigsaw of varieties. Thanks to its extensive conception, the goal of VerbaAlpina is rather to make distinguishable the (especially lexical) features which are spread over the single dialect and language borders. By doing so, the ethnolinguistic common ground will become evident.




Dialects form complete linguistic systems. This means that, when investigating these three "genetically" different continua jointly, language contact is studied in form of an interlingual geolinguistic (see in detail Krefeld 2018d).